• Ansel Elgort as Miles 'Baby': An on-call criminal getaway driver with an intense passion for music. Elgort regarded the character as an innocent "younger than his years, deep down". Edgar Wright and the producers at Working Title Films began contemplating the lead role well before they obtained funding for Baby Driver. Elgort, John Boyega, and Logan Lerman were among a raft of potential candidates considered for star billing. Elgort auditioned for the part because he found the screenplay compelling. He auditioned several times, but was hired based on a taped audition where he lip synced and danced to the Commodores' 1977 single "Easy". Wright was so impressed that the song was added to the film's soundtrack. The writer-director explained his selection of Elgort: "There's an element of an old soul in Ansel and that was something I thought connected with what I had already written."
• Lily James as Debora: A waitress employed at Bo's Diner who becomes Baby's love interest. Emma Stone was an early candidate for the role during development.
• Kevin Spacey as 'Doc': The mysterious kingpin of an Atlanta-based crime syndicate to whom Baby owes a debt. Spacey's involvement in Baby Driver was formally announced in the press in November 2015.
• Jon Hamm as Jason 'Buddy' van Horn: A laid-back Wall Street banker-turned-criminal who was brought into the criminal underworld by a drug habit. His impulsive decisions are the result of a mid-life crisis. Wright envisioned Buddy as a strong, suave, handsome character à la Doc McCoy (Steve McQueen) in The Getaway (1972) and Jack Foley (George Clooney) in Out of Sight (1998), yet much more sinister. Hamm is the only actor in Baby Driver whose character was written specifically for them, as Wright is a longtime friend and fan of his. The two men first met at a Saturday Night Live afterparty in 2008. Hamm took part in a table read several years before Baby Driver was commissioned by a studio.
• Eiza González as Monica 'Darling' Costello: Buddy's young, vivacious wife and the only woman in Doc's heist crew. She and Buddy form an intensely intimate, Bonnie and Clyde-esque pairing. Describing her as a vapid "crook space-cadet woman who has no attachment to reality", the actress joined the production in December 2015.
• Jamie Foxx as Leon 'Bats' Jefferson III: Doc's particularly sadistic, ruthless henchman, who has little regard for the people in his way. Foxx was a casting choice recommended to Wright, although he had reservations and felt the actor would not be enthusiastic about a supporting role. Foxx was fascinated with the film's artistic direction, however, and joined the project thanks to the support of Quentin Tarantino. He modeled Bats after a longtime friend he first met at a Los Angeles comedy club in his youth.

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Baby Driver was a longtime passion project Wright had been developing since 1995, when the writer-director was a struggling 21-year-old filmmaker living in suburban London. He had relocated to London to finish his first professional film, the low-budget western comedy A Fistful of Fingers, and to contemplate his future in entertainment. Wright's repeated listening to Orange (1994), the fourth studio album by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, provided the impetus for Baby Driver. At first he envisioned a high-speed car chase that was prefaced with a dance sequence soundtracked to "Bellbottoms". Though this was ultimately written into the script as the film's opening sequence, Wright's nascent vision was far from a fully realized project. By the time Baby Driver took definite form, the advent of the iPod, Wright's childhood tinnitus, and his reading of Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia (2007), which explores the neuroscience of music, were forces shaping the project's artistic direction.

On a £25,000 budget, Wright developed the music video for Mint Royale's "Blue Song" in 2003, featuring a backstory gleaned from his early concept for Baby Driver. "Blue Song" became an unexpected success, and although happy with his work, Wright was frustrated he had cannibalized an idea he felt had enormous potential. The director said that, in retrospect, he considers his music video seminal for providing proof of concept for Baby Driver. The release of Wright's first major feature, Shaun of the Dead (2004), was another important catalyst, not only for its artistic direction, but also for signaling the start of a long-term working relationship between Wright and Working Title producers, who would assist with Baby Driver's development. By 2007, after signing a multi-picture deal with Working Title, and with a clearer vision of the project, Wright met with Steven Price to discuss early musical ideas for Baby Driver. The drafting of a story started around the release of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), but pre-production of the film stalled as Wright's other projects—The World's End (2013) and the then-forthcoming Ant-Man (2015), for which he had already prepared a script with Joe Cornish—took precedence. Work resumed immediately after Wright's departure from Ant-Man, when the studio began assembling their roster of actors and technical staff before shooting. In preparation, Wright spent time with ex-career criminals in Los Angeles and London to develop an accurate depiction of a real-life bank robber's work.

Wright, lead film editor Paul Machliss, and Los Angeles-based editor Evan Schiff devised a pre-edit of Baby Driver with animatics in the initial stages of production. With Avid Media Composer, Machliss was tasked with syncopating each animatic to a corresponding song. He and Wright had an existing professional relationship from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and The World's End. In addition, Machliss worked on …

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Wright views Baby's moral shift as the thematic crux of the film. According to David Sims at The Atlantic, Baby's initial moral detachment manifests through his use of music as escapism from conflict and his tinnitus. It is only his obligation to protect Debora and Joseph and the increasing mayhem around him that force Baby to confront reality. Baby Driver employs some of the conventions of gangster film, chiefly heroic fatalism and uncompromising villainy.

Characteristic of Wright's films, Baby Driver is driven by strong color cues. Colors are used symbolically to represent the personas of the core characters. At the beginning, whereas Baby dresses in drab colors that reflect his black-and-white perspective of the universe, his peers are associated with bright, vibrant colors that clash with this sensibility: red for Bats, purple and pink for Darling, and blue for Buddy. As the story progresses and the pressures of organized crime become overwhelming, Baby's wardrobe evolves, and he is seen in faint grays and bloodstained white shirts. Costume designer Courtney Hoffman said she incorporated light gray colors into Baby's wardrobe to illustrate his struggle for freedom from the criminal world. The significance of red also transforms in tandem with the story, from a motif symbolizing the bloodthirsty Bats to one denoting Buddy's rage after the death of his lover. Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times argues that Baby Driver is an exploration of identity and personal style, and how said expression dictates one's status in society.

In their piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books, David Hollingshead and Jane Hu examine race as an important thematic element in Baby Driver. They contend that certain aspects of the film, such as the casting choices and the appeal to a "white innocence" narrative for Baby's redemption arc, underscore a race consciousness and subtext about the ethics of cultural appropriation.